Unfortunately I missed out on the Global Game Jam this year. I plan to do Philly Game Jam again this year time permitting.

A few weeks ago I attended a presentation by Miguel Nieves of Dragon’s Den Unlimited. He talked about the contract work he did on XenoCube for iOS. Here’s some of the notes I wrote down:

• Reactions to finished work is important.
• Strong focus on iterative design.
• Contractors are paid per milestone.
• Cheevos are popular. (achievements, badges, etc.)
• Free weekend with no alternative method of monetizing hurt sales more than helped. If you do a free weekend you can’t give away EVERYTHING for free.
• No Time Keeping: while contracting barring the milestones you are working on your own schedule. This has advantages and disadvantages. You can end up working on something for a long time that shouldn’t be such a high priority.
• Focus Groups: Having buddies focus group is not the optimal solution but it still can help.
• Write progress notes every day detailing what was done in the game. Review your progress notes an pay attention to what updates are trending. You may be focusing your time in a particular area. Keep track of discussions had about the game with other developers.
• Plan for updates before release.
• Users like sharing, and it’s important to include sharing features in your game.

Overall, I’ve heard a lot about contracting but I learned a lot more about the process in Miguel’s talk. Staying on task was a big theme. He had some interesting anecdotes to share.